This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citation map  • Citing articles on HighWire  • Citing articles on Web of Science (6)  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related articles  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Obesity  • Alert me on articles by topic  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

To the Editor: Dr Fontaine and colleagues¹ estimated that a body mass index (BMI) of 33 at age 40 years was associated with a loss of life expectancy of 2 to 3 years. In contrast, we recently reported that a BMI of 30 or more (mean BMI of 33) at age 40 years was associated with a loss of 6 to 7 years of life.² We believe that the method used by Fontaine et al underestimates the health effects of lifelong obesity. While we used a cohort life table to answer a cohort question, Fontaine et al used a period life table to answer a cohort question.

The cohort life table describes survival of a true cohort, using the age-specific mortality rates from a single cohort across many periods. This requires a population with a narrow age range at baseline and a long period of follow-up. By contrast, the period . . . [Full Text of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?

RELATED ARTICLES

Methods of Estimating Years of Life Lost Due to Obesity—Reply
David B. Allison, Andrew O. Westfall, David T. Redden, Chenxi Wang, and Kevin R. Fontaine
JAMA. 2003;289(22):2941-2942.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Years of Life Lost Due to Obesity
Kevin R. Fontaine, David T. Redden, Chenxi Wang, Andrew O. Westfall, and David B. Allison
JAMA. 2003;289(2):187-193.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT  

THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES

A Potential Decline in Life Expectancy in the United States in the 21st Century
Olshansky et al.
NEJM 2005;352:1138-1145.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT